Famous Builder (22 page)

I walk to my room with my new blue rugby shirt—a Christmas present from my mom—coated in wet chocolate. To my shock, my roommate and two of his dead-beat friends are sprawled out across the floor; they lean against the sides of the beds. The sliding glass window is wide open, the screen out of its track. A bitter wind ripples the
Greetings from Asbury Park
poster. Golden mud tracks the carpet and my old chenille bedspread from the Anchorage Point house. Impossibly, there’s even a crusty print halfway up the cinder-block wall.

“What?” I say, only it comes out like a whisper.

“We decided we’re going to use the window from now on instead of the door,” Joe says. He holds up a skyscraper of a bong, the tall red cylinder half the height of the room. He squeezes his eyes shut. He draws on the pipe with such frenzied energy that the water inside practically boils over the top, bubbling. A bottle of chalky pink capsules is spilled at his feet. “Here,” Joe says, holding out the bong to me.

I shake my head. I turn, pull my shirt over my head, and toss it in the wash pile. Why can’t I feel? I’m stranded, standing with a shy, pimply back to Joe and his friends before I think to reach for another shirt.

On the floor a guy’s picking some poorly tuned guitar. He plays the individual notes of a D-minor chord, then fiddles with the tuning knob of the third string. There’s a glassy, bombed-out joy in his eyes. “You must be a saint,” he says with a grin.

“Why?” I sit on my bedspread and try to rub off a muddy print with my fist.

“I couldn’t live with this guy,” he says, brows raised through the hair in his face. “I’d rather die than live with this guy. I’d rather live with my
father.
” His laugh is moist, intractable, pushed through his nostrils.

“You know something?” Joe says. His looks in my direction, but his eyes fix on somewhere other than my face—my shirt collar? “I couldn’t live with myself either.” And with that he takes another hit off the bong; he inhales with such pure exuberance that he chugs up a lung full of water. He coughs, spraying everything within five feet of his mouth with a ghastly, bacterial mist.

My eyes rest on the soundhole of his friend’s guitar. It’s more beautiful than I could have predicted, with its intricate pattern of ivories and blacks. I think of putting my nose to that opening to breathe in the warm saw-dusty interior, the smell of craft and devotion. I see the instrument maker gluing the curved pieces of wood together, the skin between unwieldy brows tensing in concentration. He brings the soundhole to his mouth and sings,
Ooh, ooh
, listening to the sound of his own baritone as it’s magnified, nourished.

I look at the peeled place atop the neck—dark purple wound—where a capo must have clamped.

My mind stills.

The poster on the wall flaps between its tacks.

And then, without pause, I drag the guy up to his feet, take my guitar out of his stunned hands, and push him up against the wall until the back of his head hits hard. “Take your hands off my guitar, fucker. Don’t you ever touch my guitar again.”

He looks back at me with equal parts awe, hatred, respect. I feel large, powerful, bigger than my body. But that power tastes terrible in my mouth. My hands and arms cannot stop shaking. The boy staggers from the room. And Joe Lubo rolls down onto the carpet, fast asleep, his left cheek pressing into his own muddy footprint.

***

In the west ballroom of the Atlantic City Convention Hall, on a stage framed with pale green-gold sea horses and Nereids, the musicians of All Eastern Orchestra tune up. The strings, woodwinds, horns, piano, chimes, and tympany swell in dissonance and mass confusion, prompting the spectators in the audience—mostly dressed-up parents, siblings—to sit up with straighter spines. They tighten their diaphragms. After all, they’ve looked forward to and, yes, dreaded this occasion for months. (What if something goes wrong? What if someone gets sick before the performance?) Michael, along with four other musicians, walks out onto the stage in concert black, squints in the glare of floodlights, and after a startled pause begins making his way through the music stands, between the stand-up basses and the cellos. He sits, leaning forward in his chair, and switches on the light above his music stand. Is he nervous about his solo? Does he want to get this over with? Maybe he’s thinking about stopping at the closed-down Lit Brothers department store tomorrow where he’ll take pictures through the front windows. Whatever’s on his mind, he looks older tonight, more solemn about the eyes, with less weight in his face, than he did when he was sitting next to me in the car just two hours ago. My parents, reddened, sit on either side of me. They scan the program, trying to pick out the names of Michael’s friends. More than anything, my father wants to tell a stranger that that’s his son in the second row, that, yes, he’ll perform the solo in the Beethoven after the intermission. But for some reason he decides to control himself. Then Michael: his face turning toward the audience. Is he looking at me? Impulsively, my hand flies up in a wave. I want people to know that I know him. But he doesn’t answer back. Instead, he turns a page, moistens the end of the reed in his mouth, begins playing a flourish of notes, all of which are lost inside the swell of tuning instruments.

Outside on the boardwalk it must be twilight. The lamps, one after another, must be blinking on.

It’s Tuesday, a gorgeous evening in May.

My father leans back in his chair. Arms folded across his chest: a look of impossible calm in his eyes. Then he puts his arm across the back of my chair and bends toward me, head nearly touching my ear. “What do you want to leave the world?”

His words are so full of meaning, so entirely outside that character I’ve built of him, that I can’t even begin to look in his direction. I look straight ahead at the woman ahead of me: the cut of her jacket around her shoulders, the dark brown ponytail falling down her slender white neck. She’s talking animatedly about so much at once: hydrangeas? Whether the ocean temperature’s warm enough for swimming?

My father repeats his question.

I can’t begin to find my way around or inside the answer. It’s a tower with too many floors. I try to climb its exterior wall, but keep slipping off, falling down onto the previous ledge. The surface is too slick. But all at once I tell him of a box. It’s full of songs, tapes, pieces of songs. No one may ever see it in my time, but that’s beside the point. All that matters is that someday, far-off in the future, someone opens it and finds pleasure in what’s inside. Taken together, the items in the box might not be useful. They might not help hunger, or hatred and indifference between people, or bring an end to terrorism and hostage-taking, but they will say one thing alone: someone lived.

My father rubs his bottom lip with his forefinger. My words seem to vex and wound. His eyes narrow; the lower half of his face slackens, which vexes me back. Clearly, I haven’t told him what he wants to hear. (He’s still thinking about the phone calls from
Folk Mass Today
that I haven’t returned; the unopened letters in which promotion plans are desperately proposed.) My collar’s tight around my neck. I’m ready to call him on his unwillingness to understand. (Here we are assuming our old roles: the ruthless and the touchy.) I want to tell him that my desires are absolutely legitimate, that it’s okay not to make records, to refuse to allow him to give away the album I made. I’m thinking all these things (how to separate one concern from the other?) as the concertmeister starts his long A and silences the ballroom in sections.

The conductor’s polished shoes tap across the floor. He walks out in impeccable tails to the sound of ripe applause. He acknowledges us with a cordial, if aloof, nod. Then, turning, he raises his baton. The players of the orchestra lift their instruments with a collective gesture, and with a downstroke, the sound rushes forward, like a wave breaking over us at once.

I stare up at the figures on the proscenium. The music is so fluid and alive, so intricate and driven, that it’s hard not to imagine the mermaids moving, the chandeliers overhead turning in response. The people around us are intense: some sit on the edges of their seats, some look almost frightened as if what they’re hearing, if they truly, deeply listened, could possibly be dangerous. They don’t just listen to the performance itself, which seems so weirdly seamless, but see and hear all the work that went into it. So many layers: the algebra homework undone, the rides to and from lessons, the heads cradled in palms after struggling through passages that were impossible to master.

Then—could that be Michael? Not that anyone but us would know; he’s buried far too deep in the mass of moving instruments to be visible to anyone even in the front row. But there’s his unmistakable voice. If it were a color, it would be the tint of old-fashioned licorice, that greenish purple you see once you bite off the end. The houses he builds of that color are animated with such beauty, feeling, and intelligence. It hurts as much as it salves; it’s almost too much to take in at once. It’s Michael’s voice that I hear; it’s Michael’s soul turning into form, but that’s not the truth of the moment. Michael, the composer, the musicians, the audience—all have fallen outside time; they’re speaking backward and forward at once, to the past, the future. And no one is separate, no one an oboist, a concertmeister, a Beethoven, or a security guard standing beneath the exit sign. But we’re all parts of it, the movement, the wholeness, the bright living thing.

My elbow touches my father’s sleeve. We hold together without tension or shyness until the strings stop reverberating.

The applause in the ballroom startles the building. I try to lift my arms, but they’re heavy; they prickle as if they’ve fallen asleep. Michael stands. The spotlight captures his startled expression. Then I clap so hard that my skin goes hot, my palms red, like hands that have been working for hours in ice water.

Sometime over the next couple of days I sit at the piano, playing chords, if tentatively. I don’t want my mother to hear, to cheer me on. It’s the first time I’ve played since January. For a moment, I think I feel Laura inside my voice and skin, but she’s gone as quickly as she came. She sits on the other side of the room, utterly separate now, wry, with raised brow.

The crowd throbs, raucous and agitated, heat wafting off bare muscles. Bicycles with bells, pedestrians, roller bladers, gym boys, baby carriages—the street’s a pachinko game; we roll in and out of each other, miraculously avoiding collision. Although it’s an Indian summer weekend on Commercial Street, it might as well be July—at least
my
idea of July. “You think this is insane,” says my friend, Hollis, “wait till you see the real summer.” Someone crushes the back of my shoe.
“Hey,”
I say, annoyed, but the stranger’s already out of earshot. On the wharf-side of the street there’s a red rectangle in the window: SUMMER BLOWOUT. People stream from the store with dazed faces and plump shopping bags, and like the good gay boys we are, we lurch toward the door.

“What about this?” I hold an aqua-striped, olive-gray sweater to my face.

“Nn nn.” Hollis says, shaking his head. “J. Crew doesn’t work here.”

I must look wounded, though I try to hold my smile. It’s not that I feel any particular allegiance to my old style; still, it’s disconcerting that there’s so much I don’t know about Provincetown culture and customs. Only last week I slept with a certain townie who biked up to me on the street and introduced himself by saying, “Hi, do you want to get high and have sex?” When I proudly (yet discreetly) pointed him out the next day, my friend Billy winced as if he’d caught me snacking on a loose Oscar Mayer wiener I’d found on the sidewalk.

“Listen,” Hollis says, more softly now. “You’re a spring. Not a summer.
I’m
a summer.” He squeezes my shoulder, then picks through the overstuffed rack. He hands me something meager. “Try this on.”

I put on an absurdly tight Tom of Finland tank top over my button-down and try to imagine standing on my parents’ front porch in Florida. (
Uhh
, says my mother, covering her face, crumbling to the floor.) I put it back. I’ve been in town but two weeks, since October 1st, and already it seems that half the populace has participated in my makeover. Billy has accompanied me to the optician in Orleans, where he’s tried to persuade me to buy lipstick red frames, which I almost assent to (does he want them for himself?), until I choose a more sensible tortoiseshell pair. My friend, Jimmy, has already shorn off the hair on the sides of my head and left the dark, foppish waves on top—a look that really seems to understand who I am, an aging boy who has one foot planted in his past, the other in who he wants to be. I can’t help but wonder whether this kind of tutelage is part of any boy’s welcome to town. Who, for instance, facilitated Hollis’s, Billy’s, and Jimmy’s welcomes, their respective entries into the frat? And who before them?

I couldn’t be more grateful for my new friends. Certainly, they want to see me flourish and thrive. They must get that I’m hungry to slough off my old skins, that I’ve had enough of being a good boy, so desperate to please. They must know that I need to be a little bad before it’s too late.

“What did you get?” I say to Hollis outside the store.

He holds up a cluster of socks—mustard green, graphite, cadmium yellow—like some mad bouquet while I show off my new polo shirt.

“Paul,” he says, eyes rolling.

“What?”

Instantly he takes the shirt from me and rips off each sleeve in two expert tears. I don’t know whether to thank him or to weep.

“Now that’s a Provincetown shirt.”

***

It comes in like a white speck on the water. Then appears as something with more dimension: a wedding cake, an igloo, a string of white boxes in descending order, hooked together on a floating raft. It’s the last arriving ferry of the season. I stand on the town beach and herald its arrival. I wave stupidly, then dip my hand in the harbor. On this fine, fair Columbus Day morning the water’s freezing, cold enough to scald.